Wednesday, 14 June 2017

'Churchill'

I do love the way the Poms put movies together. They are mostly well written and well acted and beautifully shot. Yep they sure are well put together. And I am certain that it helps that I find the landscapes romantic and gentle and inviting and in such stark contrast to Oz, so it's all foreign and familiar at the same time.

Yep, I am always happy to pop off to the pictures to see a Pommie production.

So there I was today watching 'Churchill'.

Now maybe cos I am just an Aussie gal, my knowledge of British history is sadly lacking, but as luck would have there is another movie, 'Dunkirk' which featured as a trailer so I got a bit of info from that and then I just sat back and watched.

In typical Pom fashion, the cinematography is beautiful and I reckon Poms would be able to play 'I have been to that place', but not me, I could only sit back and think how lovely all the locations are.

But if I am honest I did become a little bored with it all. I just wanted the story to move along a bit faster, after all I wasn't there to see a travel doco, I wanted to hear the story. If I was reading this I would have got to the point where I'd skip paragraphs and possibly whole pages cos I am impatient.

Anyway the movie covers the 4 days prior to D Day and even historical fools like me know something about that, so tension development was a bit of a stretch and I guess making 4 days into 2 hours is not all that easy either.

It is an intimate peek into Churchill's life and I was surprised to feel myself not liking him all that much. There are moments when he is positively yukky. And what I wondered is how was all this information gathered.

I was unaware that he gave the scotch more than a bit of a nudge. It seems he thought it was an entire food group, and I didn't know that he suffered from depression, and maybe he didn't cos his sort of depression was remarkably easy to cure in the movie, with a bit of a face slap from the Missus and some crying doe eyes of an office worker. But Churchill, the boozer, battling the black dog, seems to be well documented.

It's possible that Mrs Churchill wrote a whole lot of journals but I rather doubt it, and I am pretty sure that Mr Churchill did not write about himself being a bit of a dick.

So where do all these personal details come from?

Alex von Tunzlemann, the author, dived into the private moments and of course poetic licence is allowed.

And then I wondered whether other people watching the movie would be wondering the same stuff, and I wondered if things had moved along a bit faster then I would not have had the time to wonder at all.

So now for a recommendation, or not..... I reckon I would be happy to watch it again on the tellie if I could skip through the ads or grab it on DVD, cos let's face it, a delay of a few more months is not gonna change the well documented outcome. I am not sure it's worth the ticket price at the pictures.